Duty Faithfully Performed

On the eve of the Civil War, the Regular Army of the United States was small, dispersed, untrained for large-scale operations, and woefully unprepared to suppress the rebellion of the secessionist states. Although the Regular Army expanded significantly during the war, reaching nearly sixty-seven thousand men, it was necessary to form an enormous army of state volunteers that overshadowed the Regulars and bore most of the combat burden. Nevertheless, the Regular Army played several critically important roles, notably providing leaders and exemplars for the Volunteers and managing the administration and logistics of the entire Union Army. In this first comprehensive study of the Regular Army in the Civil War, Clayton R. Newell and Charles R. Shrader focus primarily on the organizational history of the Regular Army and how it changed as an institution during the war, to emerge afterward as a reorganized and permanently expanded force. The eminent, award-winning military historian Edward M. Coffman provides a foreword.

Confederate Civil War general Robert E. Lee has not received favorable press in recent years. Beginning with Thomas Connelly's The Marble Man in 1977, a number of historians have written books designed to topple Lee from his lofty pedestal. In Duty Faithfully Performed, noted biographer John M. Taylor ably counters these revisionist criticisms with a forceful defense of General Lee's character and military accomplishments. Focusing on Lee's personal life and values, on his generalship, and on the erstwhile Confederacy's "Lee cult," Duty Faithfully Performed is a gracefully written counter-revisionist biography of one of the most complex and controversial men in American history. Book jacket.